Metal For Nepal have launched an emergency appeal after flash floods killed hundreds in Nepal’s Rasuwa district.
Metal For Nepal has opened an emergency fundraising appeal for communities destroyed by the flash flood that tore through the Trishuli valley on 26 August.
The charity, which draws on the international metal and tattoo communities, is working with Nepali NGO partners to move emergency supplies, clean water and rebuilding support into the affected districts. It is the same operation it ran after the 2015 earthquake.
“We need to come together exactly like we did after the 2015 earthquake,” said Metal For Nepal director Flower KC. “The heavy metal and tattoo community has always shown up for people in need, and this moment is no different. Every donation goes straight toward getting families and children the support they need right now.”
The response prioritises children, who are most at risk in the days immediately after a disaster on this scale, but is intended to reach people of all ages. Donations can be made through metalfornepal.org.
The figures have moved sharply since the first reports and remain provisional.
At around 8.40am on Wednesday 26 August, a glacier collapsed near Langtang Lirung, high above the Nepal–Tibet border. The resulting landslide registered as a magnitude 5.2 event on seismometers worldwide and was initially reported as an earthquake. What followed was a wall of water, ice and rock that entered the Lhende Khola, fed into the Bhote Koshi and then the Trishuli, and travelled south.
The first 22 kilometres were covered at an average of 193 kilometres an hour, according to Jeffrey Kargel of the Planetary Science Institute, nearly fourteen miles in under seven minutes. The Trishuli rose by as much as nine metres in half an hour. In places the water reached settlements 80 metres above the normal river level.
It struck a 72-kilometre stretch and reached seven districts: Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, Gorkha, Tanahun, Nawalparasi and Chitwan. Timure, Syabrubesi and the Rasuwagadhi border post were among the settlements destroyed, along with bridges, hydropower plants and the only overland road linking Kathmandu to Tibet. On the Chinese side, the Gyirong Port complex was wrecked.
Nepali authorities have now confirmed more than 700 deaths, with thousands still unaccounted for and 466 people injured. Sixteen further deaths have been reported in the Tibet Autonomous Region. Several hundred of the missing are foreign nationals, among them citizens of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada, the border crossing carries heavy traffic from trade and from pilgrimage routes to Mount Kailash.
The scale of the recovery operation says something about the force involved. Of 616 bodies recovered by Saturday morning, only 13 were found in Rasuwa, where the flood began. Chitwan, out on the plains, accounted for 233. Some victims were carried 240 kilometres into India.
China’s Ministry of Water Resources warned on 27 August that a new barrier lake of around two million cubic metres had formed just north of the border, and that it was already overflowing. Hydrologists expected a further three million cubic metres to drain into it by today.
Tom Fletcher, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, said the warning should be taken very seriously, and that the immediate priority remains saving lives across Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading.
This is the second time in fourteen months the same river has done this. A glacial outburst in July 2025 destroyed the Nepal–China friendship bridge at Rasuwagadhi and killed more than a dozen people. The bridge had recently been rebuilt.
Scientists have told Reuters and the BBC that a warming climate likely contributed to the glacier collapse. Similar events have become steadily more common across the Himalaya, a 2023 outburst in Sikkim killed more than a hundred people, and the 2021 Uttarakhand flood killed more than two hundred.
The organisation was set up to connect the global music and art community with relief work in Nepal, and mobilised on the ground after the 2015 earthquake, which killed nearly 9,000 people.
Donations of any size go to its local partners for immediate distribution.
Figures in this article are those confirmed by Nepali authorities and international agencies as of 30 August and are expected to change as search operations continue.
